When the Mind Speaks : How Does Anxious-Depression Relate to Metacognitive Outcomes Across Social-Emotional and Cognitive Domains?

Sammanfattning

Background: Metacognition, the ability to evaluate one's own cognitive processes, plays a central role in adaptive behavior. Individuals with anxious-depressive (AD) traits are characterized by distorted metacognition, yet it remains unclear whether this distortion is domain-general (consistent across contexts) or domain-specific (varying across contexts). Previous research primarily attempted to address this knowledge gap by focusing on cognitive domains, ignoring the social-emotional domain despite evidence that anxiety and depression are associated with alterations in emotional processing. This thesis examines how the AD transdiagnostic dimension relates to metacognitive bias (overall confidence), metacognitive sensitivity (the ability to accurately differentiate between one’s correct and incorrect answers), and task performance across a non-social cognitive domain and a social-emotional domain. Method: Data from a general population sample (N = 418) were analyzed. Participants completed a dot-numerosity task and a facial emotion recognition task, providing confidence ratings after each response. The AD transdiagnostic dimension was derived via factor analysis. Results: Across both domains, higher AD scores were associated with significantly lower confidence. Higher AD scores predicted lower accuracy in the cognitive domain but higher accuracy in the social-emotional domain. Metacognitive sensitivity was unaffected by AD traits in either domain. Conclusion: This study demonstrates for the first time that underconfidence associated with AD extends to the social-emotional domain independent of objective performance. Metacognitive sensitivity was preserved in both domains. AD traits were also associated with opposing performance effects, suggesting that anxious-depression is not characterized by uniform cognitive deficits but by domain-contingent reorganization of processing resources.